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      Why Trump and Vance’s strategy is ‘say anything, make up anything’

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      JD Vance was holding court on CNN’s State of the Union programme. “The American media totally ignored this stuff,” he complained last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”But it wasn’t just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”If ever there was a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had perfected the art. The cat memes he referred to were prompted by baseless rumours about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating house pets – rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.But Vance’s willingness to “create stories” to grab attention before the November’s election hinted at a new frontier in post-truth America, where a lie is no longer slyly distributed but rather brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win political support and stir up social chaos.Some commentators draw a parallel with Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s coining of “alternative facts” when, on another Sunday politics show back in 2017, she sought to defend then White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s a logical continuation of what once was called ‘alternative facts’ by the same camp. It’s obvious that is a long-term mission statement, more than just an offhand comment.“Their entire strategy is to say anything, make up anything, invent false narratives to try and distract away from the very real consequences of their radical and extreme agenda that is so far out of the mainstream of the American people’s interests. They think they have a better chance of winning by making up insane stories about people eating pets versus having a subsequent conversation about the consequences of their policy agenda.”Dishonesty in politics is hardly new, from President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate scandal to the false claim of weapons of mass destruction used as a pretext for the Iraq war. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed official in the George W Bush administration as saying: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”View image in fullscreenIt was fertile soil for Trump, who had spent years exaggerating his personal wealth and charity giving, misleading the public about ventures such as Trump University and even misrepresenting his own height and weight. From 2011, he was a leading promoter of the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore not eligible to be US president.From his inauguration on, Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in the White House, according to a count by the Washington Post. He memorably claimed to have presided over the biggest tax cut ever – in fact, Ronald Reagan’s was bigger – and repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, telling the public that it would soon “disappear”.But perhaps the biggest lie of all came on the night of the 2020 presidential election when Trump claimed that he had won. He stuck to this position, arguing that it had been “stolen” from him through widespread voter fraud, ultimately leading to a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. He has since recast the rioters as martyrs and “patriots”.Now making his third consecutive bid for the White House, Trump’s mendacity has, if possible, shifted up a gear. He made more than 30 false claims during the presidential debate against Joe Biden in Atlanta, according to a fact-check by host network CNN, but escaped close scrutiny because of Biden’s feeble performance.In the debate against Harris in Philadelphia, he made false assertions about topics including inflation, immigration, tariffs, House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s role on January 6, Joe Biden’s role in the criminal cases against him and popular support for the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion.Astonishingly, he also plucked the racist Springfield conspiracy theory from the fever swamps of the internet and gave it a national platform before tens of millions of viewers when he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”Not for the first time that night, ABC News’s moderators were forced to step in with a fact-check. There is no evidence for such a claim. The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported that on the day Vance first promoted the rightwing rumours, Springfield’s city manager told his office that they were baseless.Vance’s team gave the Journal a police report in which a resident claimed her cat may have been stolen by Haitian neighbours. But a Journal reporter tracked down the resident and learned that her cat had been in the basement the whole time, prompting her to apologise to her neighbours.Yet still Trump and Vance persisted with the knowing falsehoods at rally after rally on the campaign trail, undeterred by warnings from the White House that they could stoke an ugly backlash against Haitians in Springfield. Then came Vance’s shocking admission that he would make stuff up and be proud of it.Days after the CNN interview, Vance continued to defend the comments while admitting that he had not fact-checked residents’ claims about the pets. “The media has a responsibility to fact-check,” he said at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in an effort to shift blame.View image in fullscreenCharlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What JD Vance is saying is that the facts don’t matter and that I am completely unashamed to have peddled a false story.“It underlines the degree to which Trump and Vance and the Maga movement are addicted to these fake online internet memes and unshakeable in their attachment to them. Even when they are refuted, they stick with them, which is a dangerous thing because it means that no matter how much evidence you can provide, no matter how dangerous the lies turn out to be, they’re not going to back off.”Sykes warned: “They’re going to keep pushing. Extrapolate this to what’s going to happen in November and the election results. Extrapolate it to anything.”On Saturday, Vance is due to appear with conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson on the former Fox News host’s live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This is despite Carlson having recently hosted Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his podcast, a decision roundly condemned by Jewish members of Congress.Trump, meanwhile, has been joined on the campaign trail by far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. She turned up at the debate and then a day later in New York to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.Loomer, who commands a following of 1.2m people on the X social media platform, has previously suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump said he had heard that Harris had used a secret earpiece during their debate, a baseless conspiracy theory that Loomer has promoted on X.Loomer also posted on X that if Harris, who is of Indian descent, wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center”. Even far-right Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the comment as racist.Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, regards Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. “Run through a list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or pushed and it’s lengthy,” he said. “It’s not as if Laura Loomer is making Donald Trump into a conspiracist. Donald Trump has been one for years. He’s now finding people who will stroke and validate his darker impulses.”There is another reason for Trump and Vance’s sense of impunity. Their lies originate from and are legitimised by a rightwing media ecosystem that now includes X, formerly Twitter, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, hosted an interview with him and sought to portray his critics as enemies of free speech.Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog Media Matters for America, said: “This is a rightwing media ticket. Donald Trump and JD Vance are both people who are fully immersed in the information ecosystem of the far right and they’ve adopted its complete lack of standards and willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends of political gain and political victory. What we’re seeing here is how these lies can spiral totally out of control. Springfield, Ohio, is experiencing some real chaos right now.”Heading into the final sprint of the election, where he could face prison if he loses, Trump is surpassing himself with a blitz of falsehoods. On Thursday, CNN’s fact-checkers produced a list of “12 completely fictional stories” that he has told in the last month, including Harris reintroducing the military draft, schools sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ knowledge and Harris negotiating with Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2022 in an effort to prevent the invasion of Ukraine.Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said: “There’s nothing worse than a desperate man. There’s nothing worse than a desperate racist man who cannot control the woman in front of him who happens to be African American. Cannot control the conditions around him that have changed – the tightening of the political race for the presidency.“Cannot control what people are saying about him, the fact that Republicans are now coming out and speaking against a second Trump term and are creating lanes in which we are willing to support the Democrat over Donald Trump because he is that bad and that dangerous. When he cannot control that, he becomes even more dangerous and more desperate and you need to be aware of that because there’s more of this coming between now and November.” More

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      Ohio residents flock to Springfield’s Haitian restaurants: ‘They are family’

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      The line down the center of the Rose Goute Creole restaurant on Springfield, Ohio’s South Limestone Street is halfway out the door. It’s been like this ever since former president Donald Trump falsely accused immigrants in Springfield of eating cats and dogs during a televised debate on 10 September.At the back of the restaurant, kitchen staff scramble to take orders and load plates of herring patties, rice and beans, and barbecued chicken legs on to serving trays. Outside, cars with plates from Georgia, Wisconsin and Indiana – diners who’ve stopped off a nearby highway to show support for the Haitian community – fill the parking lot.It’s a partly chaotic scene, as Dady Fanfan, a 41-year-old from Plaisance in northern Haiti, stands inside the door, greeting diners as they enter, before slipping away to clear nearby tables.“One day I came to the restaurant to buy something, and I saw there was a lot of people,” says Fanfan, who despite not knowing the restaurant owners personally is this week spending his free time helping his countrymen and women. “I just stayed a little bit to help them, and then the next day I came because they are family.”As Trump and JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and Ohio senator, continue to spread false information about Haitians in Springfield, regular people from the city and beyond are taking it upon themselves to seize back the narrative around immigrants in the Ohio city.And the outpouring of support aimed at countering Trump’s damaging comments hasn’t been limited to volunteering.Many community healthcare centers and support organizations that have been assisting Haitians in Springfield for several years are reporting increased donations and contributions coinciding with the furor of the past 10 days.“In the last three days, we’ve taken cash donations about seven times the normal rate, and it’s specifically because of this polarization,” says Casey Rollins, executive director of Springfield’s Society of St Vincent de Paul. She says the money is then transferred to gift cards to be used by those in need at a local international grocery store.Unlike his party colleagues, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has come out in strong support for the Haitian community, urged Trump and Vance to end their “very hurtful” comments and pledged $2.5m over two years to assist healthcare organizations in Springfield.“I’m just trying to make it easier for them to go through the firestorm that they’re in,” says Sammy, who drove her Yamaha motorbike 176 miles (283km) from Cleveland last Saturday and pulled into the parking lot of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center without knowing a single person in town. Seeing the threats and hate for Springfield’s Haitians online and having served in the army, she wanted to help protect people she saw as innocent victims.“I believe that America does best when it is one community standing up for, protecting and in solidarity with another,” she says.Sammy, who asked not to be fully identified as she is a trans woman in the process of changing names, says she’s seen supporters bring fresh garden vegetables, perform yard work around the center, and drop off furniture and office supplies.“It’s been one of the most American experiences of my life,” she says.“It’s humbling.”As Sammy speaks, JoAnn Welland, 79, from the neighboring town of Enon, walks by the front of the center, asking where she can donate.“The people who are coming here [from Haiti] have sacrificed so much to come, and Springfield, in my opinion, is a lovely town,” she says. Welland says she was motivated to get into her car and drive to the Haitian community center to donate after hearing the lies on television about Haitians eating pets.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Then, I heard that the town hall got a bomb threat, the elementary school got a bomb threat. The hatemongering, that’s wrong. That’s ugly and negative and hateful. This is my way of standing up for truth,” Welland says.But even as Welland speaks, across town three supermarkets are abruptly evacuated and closed due to bomb threats, dozens of which have set the town on edge since Trump singled out Springfield during last week’s debate. One Springfield elementary school saw around 200 children absent from classes on Tuesday due to security concerns and bomb threats, which largely have been found to be hoaxes.Earlier this week, CultureFest, a fall festival beloved by locals, was canceled to “prevent any potential risks” to attendees. A debate involving local politicians up for election has also been canceled.Springfield’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, has pleaded for both presidential candidates not to come to the town, saying it would place an extreme strain on the city’s already stretched resources. Despite that, at a rally in New York on Wednesday, Trump said he’d travel to Springfield in the coming weeks.Back at the Rose Goute Creole restaurant, the stream of customers keeps coming. Orders stack up as hungry Haitian workers wearing T-shirts depicting their employers dart over to the counter to collect their orders before scampering back out the door.And Fanfan isn’t alone. Amanda Payen hands out free bottles of water and asks diners if they’re being served. Her husband, Jacob, who’s from Port-au-Prince but lived in Florida for decades before coming to Springfield, thanks diners for coming in as they leave.None are employees of the restaurants, but as Haitians, they want to help.“I’ll come back again tomorrow,” says Fanfan, “and if I see they need help, I’ll stay.” More

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      Trump rejects Harris call for second debate, saying ‘it’s too late’

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      Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.Shortly afterwards, Trump spoke at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said that Harris only wants a rematch because she is losing.“She’s done one debate, I’ve done two. It’s too late to do another, I’d love to in many ways but it’s too late, the voting is cast, the voters are out there, immediately – is everybody voting, please? Get out and vote,” Trump said.The first in-person voting began in Minnesota, Virginia and South Dakota on Friday and some postal ballots were sent out a few days earlier.Harris and Trump held their first presidential debate in Philadelphia on 10 September, with Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House, widely deemed to have won – a judgment rejected by Trump.The lead-up to that event was touch-and-go, scheduled originally when Biden had been at the top of the Democratic ticket, but Trump eventually acquiesced to appear, while the Harris campaign eventually agreed to the original rules of muted microphones when it was not the candidate’s turn to speak.Two days after the debate, when Trump had said he wouldn’t do another, he cited Harris’s invitation for a rematch then as proof he’d won the first.“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote.This prompted the Harris campaign to taunt Trump as a chicken, and Saturday’s ostentatious acceptance of another debate invitation also seemed designed to needle her opponent.The vice-presidential debate is on 1 October between Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate and the governor of Minnesota, and JD Vance, a US senator for Ohio.Debate scheduling and platforming have become almost as contentious as the election campaign itself. The Harris and Trump campaigns repeatedly clashed over where, on what TV network, with which moderators and in what format they should debate, such as with muted or unmuted microphones, or whether with an audience or not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter the debate hosted by ABC News earlier this month, Trump criticized the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he claimed was a biased approach.“They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization,” he grumbled on Fox News.But a post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters who responded said, by double digits, that the moderators had been “fair and unbiased”.While 43% said they had been fair, 29% said they had been biased in Harris’s favor and 4% said they had been biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55% of Republicans saying the moderators had been biased in Harris’s favor.But Trump praised, in comparative terms, the debate he’d had with Biden in June, saying the cable network was “more honorable” than ABC.CNN moderators did not live-fact-check the candidates, while ABC’s moderators did, including, most memorably, David Muir debunking as baseless the racist rightwing conspiracy theory repeated by Trump that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating other residents’ pets.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Harris campaign raised triple the funds in August that Trump team took in

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign raised more than triple the funds that Donald Trump’s did in August, according to the latest figures released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).The US vice-president and the Democratic National Committee saw $257m (£193m) flow into their coffers, compared with $85m (£64m) raised by the former president and the Republican National Committee, continuing a towering financial fundraising advantage that has been leveraged since Joe Biden stepped away from his re-election bid in July and Harris became the party’s nominee for the White House.The FEC’s release on Friday showed that the Democratic campaign of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, and the Democratic National Committee have $286m (£215m) to play with in the final two months before the election on 5 November, compared with Trump’s $214m (£161m).Harris’s cash advantage translated into significantly more spending: FEC disclosures show spending on the Harris-Walz campaign reached $174m (£131m) last month, almost three times as much as the Trump campaign outlays of $61m (£47m).Campaign and national committee combined spending shows a less extreme split. Harris and the Democrats splurged with $258m (£194m) last month into her sprint for the presidency, with Trump and the Republicans dropping $121m (£91m) on campaign advertising and costs, $36m (£27m) more than they raised that month.Meanwhile, tech mogul Elon Musk also made his largest federal political contribution to date, giving a total of $289,100 (£217,090) to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), a committee dedicated to supporting Republican candidates in the US House of Representatives. The party narrowly controls the lower chamber of Congress, while Democrats have a wafer-thin majority in the US Senate and both parties are battling fiercely for control.Despite the Harris campaign cash advantage, allowing her to blanket the airwaves with ads, opinion polls both nationally and in swing states show an extremely tight race. Both campaigns have said most of their spending was on ads, with smaller sums paying for rallies, travel and campaign staff salaries.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Harris campaign spent more than $135m (£101m) on media buys and ad production in August, FEC records showed; more than $6m (£4.5m) on air travel; about $4.9m (£3.7m) on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5m (£3.4m) on text messaging. Harris’s campaign has assembled at least 2,000 aides and 312 campaign field offices across the battleground states.The Trump campaign has not disclosed comparative details about the size of its operation. In August, it spent more than $47m (£35m) on ads, alongside $10.2m (£7.7m) on direct mail to potential voters and about $670,000 (£503,000) on air travel.The financial disclosures come as an intriguing interpretation of how each candidate might get to the winning threshold of 270 electoral college votes has emerged: if Harris wins the northern swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and North Carolina, but loses the Sun belt swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, then the 2024 election could come down to Nebraska, where five electoral college votes are assigned proportionally but there is a push by Republicans to change that to a winner-take-all system. More

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      Saginaw: the swing county in the swing state that could decide the election

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      A local law says that residents of Saginaw Township in Michigan cannot publicly display political signs in support of a presidential candidate until 30 days before the US election, even on their own front lawns.But you wouldn’t know it while driving through this neat midwestern township that borders a town of the same name – simply, Saginaw – in the most closely contested county, also called Saginaw, of a battleground state that Donald Trump won in 2016 when he took the White House and then lost in 2020 when Joe Biden wrested it from his control.With more than six weeks until what many Americans regard as the most consequential US presidential election in decades, some Saginaw Township residents have defied the ban to declare their loyalties to their neighbors. Trump campaign signs outnumber those for Kamala Harris, but scattered among them are posters proclaiming that the former US president is a convicted felon who belongs in prison and not the Oval Office.One Saginaw Township resident interpreted the newfound unwillingness of local officials to enforce their own ban on political signs as a desire to avoid confrontation in these politically charged times.For Saginaw Township’s population, there is the added weight that not all votes are equal in the US thanks to the vagaries of the electoral college system and that theirs count for more than most. The county is crucial to who wins Michigan and the state looks likely to be pivotal in deciding the next occupant of the White House.In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Saginaw county by just 1.1% of the ballot as he took Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. Four years later, Biden won back the county for the Democrats by only 303 votes as he once again returned the state into the Democratic column.View image in fullscreenThis year, the Harris campaign sees Michigan as a key part of its clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Saginaw county will be a litmus test of whether the Democratic nominee can pull that off and keep Trump from returning for a second term that many observers fear will risk authoritarianism in the USA.So Saginaw is an ideal place from which to observe this epic US presidential election, the third in a row with Trump on the ballot – and not just because the vote has been so close in the past. The state of this county mirrors many of the issues faced by other places that will decide this contest.Saginaw has a once-booming industrial base in long decline but which is still important. Widespread poverty exists alongside prosperous suburbs in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. There are changing racial demographics and, for many, a sense of drift with no clear plan for the future.In the US’s Democratic-dominated big urban centers – such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle – it is not uncommon to hear Americans wonder how it is that this year’s election is even close given Trump’s political and criminal record. Many seem to be still grappling with the same questions that surfaced eight years ago when he stunned the nation by defeating Hillary Clinton. At times, it feels as if they regard places like Saginaw county as a distant, foreign landscape.Seen from Saginaw, however, the election can look very different.View image in fullscreenThe Guardian asked people who live in the county to tell us where we should go, who we should talk to and what we should look at in order to understand the area and its place in the election.Among those who replied was Geordie Wilson, a former teacher, who wrote: “Saginaw is possibly the most economically and racially divided area in the country. It is the epicenter of our national divide.”Several people mentioned their fears about the future of American democracy if Trump returns to the White House, including Jamie Forbes, who is recently married and works for the local public transport system. Forbes also spoke about the economy, a common theme nationally and locally. He said he wants to see “wealthy people and corporations paying their fair share in taxes”.“Saginaw issues: Continuing attempts for our economy to recover from automakers pulling jobs, attraction and diversification of new industry, crime, small business success,” he wrote.Valerie Silvernaile, a medical procedure scheduler, said it was important to protect workers’ rights in the industries that remain.“Unions are important here. We need a candidate who isn’t a union buster,” she said.One middle-aged man said he has never voted but will this year, for Trump: “Food prices, safety and jobs. Trump has addressed all of this for me between listening to him and his website.”Michael Colucci, a chemical engineer who has lived in Saginaw Township for 40 years, wrote that “you can visit all of America in a 20-mile stretch along M-46”, the Michigan highway running east to west through the county.View image in fullscreen“Most Americans live in communities where most people think like them. Saginaw is small enough that everyone has the occasion to interact with everyone else,” he said.Colucci, who lives in an electoral precinct where Trump and Hillary Clinton each won 49.5% of the vote in 2016, took the Guardian on a drive to show what he meant. It began in the city of Saginaw, which Colucci calls a “mini Detroit” for its abandoned factories and housing.In 1968, Saginaw was one of 10 communities across the US awarded the title of “All-America City” by the National Civic League. Those were the boom times.Since then, the population of the city has dropped by more than half to fewer than 45,000 people, as jobs disappeared and residents decamped. That also drove a change in Saginaw’s demographics. Twenty-five years ago, Saginaw city was about evenly divided between white and Black residents in addition to a Latino minority. The white population has dropped sharply, to less than 35%.Colucci pointed out mansions built by the lumber barons whose sawmills drove the city’s 19th-century development when demand for timber from Michigan’s pine forests surged as the US colonised lands to the west. But more often, there were just grass-covered patches of ground where auto factories and shopping malls once stood.Some of the first cars built in America were assembled in Saginaw. Over decades, factories drew in workers from across the country to manufacture gear boxes and steering assemblies fitted into vehicles in Detroit. Saginaw city and its environs were home to a dozen General Motors plants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy the 1980s, the industry was in rapid retreat from Saginaw. The last GM plant, today called Saginaw Metal Casting Operations, employed 7,000 people in 1970. Now it provides work to fewer than 350.The factories stood abandoned for years, symbols of a lost prosperity, until the Biden administration provided funds to tear them down. When the jobs went, shops and hotels closed. In the heart of downtown, department stores have given way to public services including an employment office, a college and a healthcare centre for lower-income families.View image in fullscreenA brand-new school opened on the riverbank this month. But it, too, is a testament to decline after attendance at the city’s two main high schools, once sharp sporting rivals, fell so low that they were closed and combined.Simon & Garfunkel’s iconic 1960s song America was written in the city and includes a line about taking “four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw”. Fifteen years ago, an artists collective, Paint Saginaw, daubed lyrics from the song on dozens of abandoned factories, bridges and empty buildings, including the line: “All gone to look for America,” as a lament to people moving out. But the population had not so much gone to look for America as shuffled a few miles down the road.As Colucci drives west, he crosses from the city, passes the sprawling golf course of Saginaw Country Club, and heads into the suburbs of Saginaw Township.In 1980, the city was nearly four times as large as the township. Now, they are about the same size after many residents of one bled into the other. But the township has nearly twice the median income and is 89% white.Crossing from one to the other, the quality of housing changes fast. So do the voting patterns.Saginaw city overwhelmingly voted against Trump in both the presidential elections he contested. Clinton won 76% of the ballot in 2016 and Biden pulled in similar support four years later.Saginaw Township was a different story. Trump beat Clinton there by three points in 2016. Four years later, he lost by a similar margin to Biden.In other words, it wasn’t the poorest part of Saginaw that once delivered for Trump but one of the most prosperous. Colucci has an explanation.“Trump promises them that he’s going to stop the world from changing,” he said.Then he scoffs: “He promised to stop coal disappearing and it literally disappeared while he was president.”The outcome of this election is likely to hang on turnout. Trump’s vote in Michigan went up in 2020 but he was beaten because many of those Democrats who stayed home four years earlier came out to remove him from the White House.View image in fullscreenColucci volunteered for Clinton’s campaign but lamented that her organisers placed too much confidence in data, didn’t listen to local advice and failed miserably to mobilise Democratic voters on election day. It is an often bitterly expressed complaint heard repeatedly over the years across Rust belt states that Clinton should have won.Biden’s campaign evidently did better and there are clear signs that Harris has learned the lessons. But the challenge remains.Nearly 75% of registered voters in Saginaw Township cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. Fewer than 50% of Saginaw city turned out.In other Trump strongholds such as Frankenmuth, a small city in the south-east of the county known as Little Bavaria, turnout was 82%. Frankenmuth, which celebrates its German heritage in its architecture and its own Oktoberfest this weekend, twice voted overwhelmingly for Trump and his anti-immigrant agenda.Still, nothing is a given.Among those who contacted the Guardian was Mark Paredes, a former US diplomat and lifelong conservative who said he would never vote for Trump and is therefore supporting Harris.“If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would have been quite amused,” he wrote. More

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      Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer

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      “Understand this about immigration,” Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a staunch Democrat, said in an interview on HBO earlier this month. “The best speech on immigration was by President Ronald Reagan.”Pelosi is not alone among Democrats heaping praise on the 40th president for his pro-immigration views, defiance of tyranny and politics of optimism – “It’s morning in America.” For many he has come to symbolise nostalgia for a more innocent, less partisan time. Visitors to America’s capital often land at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport. A newly released biopic starring Dennis Quaid is the latest burnishing of the myth.But a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions, balancing recognition of Reagan’s strengths with a close examination of his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its introduction poses a provocative question: “Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?”And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank.“I guess my relationship with the Republican party is like the love affair that ended badly,” Boot, 55, says in a Zoom interview from his white-walled home in New York. “I was an ardent admirer of Reagan as a young man in the 1980s.“He made conservatism cool for a lot of people including me growing up in that decade and all the more so in my case because I was born in the Soviet Union and my family came here and so tended to gravitate towards the right side of the political spectrum. I loved it when he called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’ and stood up for human rights behind the iron curtain. He made me a Republican.”View image in fullscreenBut a day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Boot reregistered as an independent. He believes this has given him an objectivity and distance from his biographical subject. “That’s allowed me to write a much better book than I would have written in the past if I were writing from a pro-Reagan or pro-Republican standpoint. What I tried to do was to do a very balanced job that was neither hagiography nor hit job but trying to show Reagan both good and bad.”In Reagan: His Life and Legend, Boot acknowledges the personal and political differences between Reagan, born in 1911, and Trump, born in 1946. Reagan, he argues, was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people realise. He was pro-free trade, pro-immigration, pro-Nato and anti-Russian expansionism. Boot has no doubt that he would have supported Ukraine in its battle against Vladimir Putin. Reagan also had a sunny, optimistic vision of America, a sharp contrast from Trump’s “American carnage”.But there are through lines, all the same. “Clearly the Republican party has evolved in ways that Reagan could have never anticipated and yet I don’t think you can just say, wow, Trump arrived from Mars and there was no relationship between what he’s saying and doing and previous decades in the Republican party,” Boot argues.“Just as a historian, that seems to me very ahistorical because we know things don’t come out of nowhere. You can trace the linkages and see that despite the huge differences between Trump and Reagan, there are also various resemblances and similarities.”The first and most obvious is that both men were television hosts – Reagan on General Electric Theater, one of the most popular shows of the late 1950s and early 1960, and Trump on The Apprentice, one of the most popular shows of the 2000s and 2010s.Boot comments: “Both Reagan and Trump beamed into people’s homes so that people assumed that they knew them, that they were like a friend but, in many ways, they were falling for the image rather than the reality. In Trump’s case, the image was that he was this super-successful wheeler-dealer whereas we now know that so many of his companies went bankrupt and he had a very chequered business record.View image in fullscreen“In Reagan’s case, it was this image as the man nextdoor, somebody who was like this friendly neighbour and warm friend, which was certainly the image that he projected. And yet it was striking to me, talking to people who knew him well, that actually Ronald Reagan had this glacial reserve. He would have made a pretty good hermit. That’s an indication of how TV can distort reality.”Reagan also became a Hollywood film actor, which caused later critics to question his political and intellectual heft. In the 1985 time travel caper Back to the Future, Doc Brown says, “Tell me, Future Boy, who’s President of the United States in 1985?” When Marty McFly says Ronald Reagan, an incredulous Doc retorts: “Ronald Reagan! The actor? Then who’s vice-president, Jerry Lewis?”But Reagan was in a different league from Trump, who once used a black Sharpie marker to alter an official hurricane map and suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. Boot says: “It’s all relative because Reagan was certainly criticised for knowing so little about the government and paying so little attention to details, which was true compared to other presidents. But he was practically like a political science PhD compared to Trump because he was actually interested in ideas.“It wasn’t all just about himself. It wasn’t all about boosting his own ego. You could argue about his ideas and you could say maybe that they were bad ideas, but he had ideas and he was devoted to them and he read and he wrote. I read all of his letters that are extant and he was a beautiful writer. There was a lot more intellectual substance with Reagan than with Trump, even though Reagan was also accused of being a lightweight.”Reagan was hailed as “the great communicator”. When asked how relevant his acting career had been for the presidency, he replied: “There have been times, in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do this job if you hadn’t been an actor.”Both Reagan and Trump were populists who reviled Washington, though the former did not refer to it as “the deep state”, and both used the campaign slogan “Make America great again”. Boot also points to more troubling resemblances, including Reagan’s poor record on civil rights and racial justice.Reagan himself insisted that he was incapable of prejudice, pointing to the example of his father, Jack, who was of Irish Catholic ancestry and therefore the victim of discrimination, as giving Reagan some sensitivity about the experience of minorities. “But he was pretty oblivious to the African American experience,” Boot contends.“He talked about his home town of Dixon, Illinois, as being a wonderful place where people loved each other and neighbours supported each other and – he wouldn’t have said it this way – it was like a kumbaya spirit prevailed. When I actually researched Dixon in the 1920s, what I discovered was it was a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan.“The Klan was having massive rallies right outside of town. They were marching through the downtown and in their white sheets. This is what Reagan’s neighbours were actually up to and the town actually even had segregation, even though it wasn’t in the south. The movie theatre was segregated; Black people had to sit in a separate area. It wasn’t all peace and love but he was kind of oblivious to it.”View image in fullscreenTime and again in his early political career, Reagan was on the wrong side of history. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his race for governor of California in 1966, he opposed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.In a 1971 phone call with President Richard Nixon, Reagan made racist remarks about African delegates to the United Nations, calling them “monkeys” and saying they were still “uncomfortable wearing shoes”. He did not attend Martin Luther King’s funeral, even though many Republicans did, and opposed the Martin Luther King Jr public holiday right up until the day he signed it into law.Boot comments: “He certainly did not engage in the openly racist appeals of a George Wallace or Trump for that matter but he certainly used race-neutral, coded language that people understood, talking about law and order, talking about we can’t allow our streets to turn into a jungle, talking about welfare queens, that infamous episode in the 1980 election where he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair [in Mississippi] and talked about states’ rights a few miles from where three civil rights workers have been slain by the Klan.“He had a double standard on human rights abroad, where he was very tough, and rightly so, on human rights violations in the Soviet Union but he was very weak on human rights violations in South Africa and in fact vetoed a tough sanctions bill on South Africa. I can’t judge what was in Reagan’s heart but I know his political record and it was one of catering to white backlash voters but doing it in seemingly neutral language which didn’t alarm moderates, didn’t turn off centrists.”A generation later, Trump dispensed with Reagan’s dog whistle and replaced it with a bullhorn, deploying blatantly racist stereotypes in pursuit of the same goal. Boot adds: “He’s not nearly as deft. He does it with these crazy stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs or whatever. Reagan loved an apocryphal story himself but nothing quite that crude or crazy.”The parallels do not stop there. Each was a Democrat before they were a Republican. Each was the oldest US president in history when he took office (a record since surpassed by Joe Biden). Each survived an attempted assassination by a loner with no apparent political motive. Just as Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, Reagan had a devastating blind spot when it came to Aids, despite the efforts of scientists such as Anthony Fauci.View image in fullscreenBoot comments: “When you look back at his presidency, the fact that he completely ignored Aids and it was killing tens of thousands of people, that’s a major blot on his record. He even speculated that Aids could be God’s punishment for gay people and so forth – things that were commonly said, I guess, in straight society in the 1980s.“At the time reporters would joke with Reagan aides about Aids; the reporters thought it was a big joke, too. It wasn’t like they were holding him to account. But standards have greatly changed and now, from our vantage point, it seems shocking that Reagan and a lot of his senior aides were so callous about Aids.”Ultimately, Boot argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump. “He was addicted to faux facts. He would often cite apocryphal quotes and anecdotes and statistics that weren’t really true but would keep citing them anyway, even when it was pointed out that he didn’t have any basis for doing so. You can argue that acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you see from Trump.“Even more fundamentally, Reagan’s policies truly favoured the wealthy and increased income disparity in the United States. You can argue that those policies, whether it was the tax cuts, lack of anti-trust, anti-union activity, all the rest, by widening those income disparities opened the way for populism in America, both from the left and the rightwing populism that Trump exploits today.”Reagan remains a convenient political prop for Republicans in 2024. Several candidates in this year’s party primary sought to position themselves as Reagan’s true heir, with former vice-president Mike Pence often recalling that he “joined the Reagan revolution and never looked back”. Even Trump regularly calls the former president as a defence witness on abortion, stating that “like President Ronald Reagan before me, I support the three exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother”.View image in fullscreenReagan died in 2004, aged 93, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. If he were still alive today, it is impossible to imagine him delivering a Maga speech on Trump’s behalf at a campaign rally or convention. Boot reflects: “Every generation of Republicans has been more rightwing than the previous generation. Reagan was well to the right of Nixon and Ford. Trump is now well to the right of Reagan.“I’m sure that if Reagan were still alive, he would be being denounced as a Rino [Republican in name only], just as George Bush and Dick Cheney and so many others are today. After all, in 1986 Reagan signed this immigration bill that legalised millions of undocumented immigrants – what Republicans today would denounce as an amnesty bill and so very different from what Maga Republicans would do.“The ultimate irony here is that, in 1980, when Reagan was elected, Reaganism was pushing the Republican party in the country to the right. Today, if Reaganism were to prevail on the Republican party, it would be pushing the Republican party to the left, to the centre.”Both Reagan and Trump demonstrated the power of personality to shape the Republican party in their own image. Where celebrity led, ideology followed. Boot wonders if the same thing could happen when the party finally enters the post-Trump era.“It’s possible to imagine maybe there will be some charismatic, transcendent individual in the future who might have much more moderate views than Trump does and, if so, that person could easily gain ascendancy over the Republican party. It’s also possible that a rightwing demagogue who’s as crazy as Trump but even more effective could be the future of the Republican party.“It’s up for grabs – too soon to know. But based on the Reagan and Trump precedent, maybe we should be looking for the next leader of the Republican party among people who host national TV shows.” More

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      Republicans step up effort to change Nebraska voting rules to help Trump

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      Congressional Republicans are demanding an 11th-hour change to Nebraska’s presidential voting system in a move that could transform the electoral calculus and tip the race to Donald Trump in the event of a photo finish.With polls showing Trump neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris both nationally and in battleground states, senior GOP congressional figures are pressing the Nebraska legislature to replace a system that splits the allocation of its electoral college votes with the straightforward winner-takes-all distribution that operates in most US states.The change would increase the number of electors allotted to Trump for winning the solidly Republican state from four to five – and raises the possibility that the former president could end up tied with Harris at 269 electoral votes each.Such a scenario would pitch the ultimate decision on the election into the House of Representatives, which has the constitutional authority to certify the results – meaning the outcome of November’s House election, in which Republicans are defending a wafer-thin majority, could be even more pivotal than usual.In a sign of the raised stakes, the South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham – a close Trump ally – visited Nebraska this week and urged legislators to find the extra votes needed to revert its electoral college distribution procedure back to the winner-takes-all system it used before 1992.Pressure was also ratcheted up by the state’s five US congressional members, who wrote to Nebraska’s governor, Jim Pillen, and the speaker of its single-chamber legislature, John Arch, who are both Republicans.“As members of Nebraska’s federal delegation in Congress, we are united in our support for apportioning all five of the Nebraska’s electoral votes in presidential elections according to the winner of the whole state,” read the Nebraska delegation’s letter, posted on X by GOP House member Mike Flood, one of its signatories. “It is past time that Nebraska join 48 other states in embracing winner-take-all in presidential elections.”A two-thirds majority of the Republican-led chamber is needed to change the system. Only 31 or 32 of the 50-seat body are thought to be in favour, meaning the spotlight is being focused on the state senator Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who turned Republican this year but swore he would never support winner-takes-all.Local media reports have depicted McDonnell as wavering amid speculation that Trump may soon contact him personally.The issue is potentially vital because some pollsters have predicted that Harris is on course to win exactly the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House by winning the three northern swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where recent polling has shown her with small but consistent leads.However, she would fall short by just one if a winner-takes-all distribution was adopted in Nebraska, whose second congressional district – encompassing the state’s largest city, Omaha, and its suburbs – together with its single electoral vote is expected to fall to Harris, as it did to Joe Biden in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo avoid a tie, Harris would need to win the three northern battlegrounds along with at least one of four southern Sun belt states – North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona – where she and Trump are deadlocked, but where polls often show the former president with a tiny edge.Unlike most other states, Nebraska does not allocate its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote, but instead gives that candidate two electoral votes while awarding the rest on the basis of which party wins its three congressional districts.Maine is the only other state to operate a comparable system. This year, its Democratic house majority leader vowed that it would cancel out any move in Nebraska to revert to a winner-takes-all approach by introducing a similar change in Maine.However, by leaving the push until less than seven weeks before the 5 November election, Republicans may have blocked off that option.Maine’s legislative rules deem that a bill can only become law 90 days after its passage, unless it is passed with two-thirds majorities in both chambers, meaning there will be insufficient time to implement a new system by polling day. Although Democrats have majorities in the state’s house and senate, they do not have supermajorities. More